I think the title of this blog post is very self explanatory. There has always been a debate in the blogger community about whether to show full feeds RSS, or to show partial RSS Feeds. I always had the debate in my head also in the beginning, but I have decided to go with Full feed RSS. Find out why in this post. Also I wanted to ask my users because you are the ones who subscribe to them. Which one do you find better? This question was inspired by the question and answer week on Problogger, and I thought it would be a great time to ask my user the same question and get their views. As well as answer this mystery in my ways.

What is the difference between Full Feed RSS and Partial Feed RSS?

Full Feed RSS is when you show your full posts in your RSS Feeds which means everthing is shown in the rss feeds. Whereas Partial RSS feeds are when you show an excerpt of your posts to notify users that you have a new post, and if they like the excerpt they can come visit your site and read more.

Partial RSS Feeds

Partial RSS Feeds are a great way to keep people to visit your blog rather than just having them read your blog posts through the feeds. Also with Partial RSS Feeds you are eliminating the risk of duplicate content because scammers who are copying content cannot extract the content from your rss feeds. By choosing Partial RSS Feeds, you give your subscribers a reason to visit your blog and that is to read your full post. Most people subscribe to this type of feed for notification purposes.

Disadvantages of Partial RSS Feeds are ………………….[Read the full post to learn about which way is effective and some techniques that I have been using]

Alright Everyone, for those of you who don’t know what Pimp My Blog is then you should read the link I showed you for full details. In summary, Pimp My Blog is a similar Idea from Pimp my ride (on MTV). In this show at Balkhis, I take my email subscribers and randomly generate an email. I will email that person, and tell them that they are the winner. The winner will get a completely pimped Wordpress Blog Design.

Last Blog that was pimped was Simon Emery.

I will be drawing on May 1st, so the deadline of all email subscription are set for April 29th or before. Only active email subscribers count, so if you subscribe make sure you verify your email, and check back every day.

Do you want that logo and a completely pimped Design. Don’t wait Subscribe NOW

I will be using a random generator website. I already have one, but if any of you guys have any recommendations I will surely look into those.

People who are in the top commentator list will get more than one entry in the drawing.

Well it is not long after the last Wordpress (2.5) release which was on March 29th. Not even a month after Wordpress has announced the release of the newer version Wordpress 2.5.1. This is a must upgrade version. Find out Why?

Wordpress has announced a very important security fix in this release. The vulnerability of the older version is not out in the public yet, but it will be shorty. According to the wordpress website everyone should upgrade to this release, particularly those who have open registration on their blog, so I am assuming this is a registration bug which is quiet major.

Aside from the security fix, there were number of other bugs that were fixed and several improvements were made in regards to performance enhancement. If you download this Wordpress 2.5.1, you will be getting over 70 bug fixes as well as improved perfomance. Just an overview of the update:

• – Performance improvements for the Dashboard, Write Post, and Edit Comments pages.
• – Better performance for those who have many categories
• – Media Uploader fixes
• – An upgrade to TinyMCE 3.0.7
• – Widget Administration fixes
• – Various usability improvements
• – Layout fixes for IE

Download Wordpress 2.5.1

Well what the heck are you waiting for? Upgrade your blogs…. I just upgraded mine because I CARE. Do you care?? You are still reading go on and upgrade.

I see alot of new blogs that are being started, but they lack commentators. Even though Balkhis was launched only two months ago , I have manage to get a fairly decent amount of comments, and as you can see the comments are increasing as my reader base grows. I have put together a list of what I have seen a trend with Balkhis that increases the number of comments on post and in general.

Offer Incentives to commentators

Offering incentives to your commentators will keep them coming back to your blog and post comments daily. One of the most easiest and effective incentive you can offer is listing your top commentators, in your sidebar or some other place (Sitewide) and do-follow. I hate blogs who actually pretend to list the commentators but then you see they are no following all the links. If I come in and post a half comment, ofcourse the blogger won’t like it. Just like I don’t like that happening. Though I will say that when there is nice content, I leave a reply regardless of this top commentator incentive or not. Another effective technique is having a contest. You can give out prizes to your top 3 commentators. This might increase your spam a little, but you will get alot of valuable comments as well.

Offer helpful advices / tutorials

Offering helpful advices will definately increase comments on your website. How? Well if you follow all the SEO Advices that I have given then you are very well likely to get decent rankings for some good long-tailed keywords. Which will bring new users to your site, and most will say thanks if they like your advice and even stay on the blog to read more. Example of an advice article I wrote was 5 things that can hurt the Search Engine Ranking Positions of your Website. Now always be prepared to get some negative feedback also. Some people might come and put their opinion that might completely disagree with your article which is fine. Also tutorial type articles like How to add a dynamic sidebar in wordpress? will lead people to ask you questions. You can reply to those questions and have an entire conversation.

Interact with your users

Bringing me to my next point which is interacting with your users. Always ask questions in your post that readers can reply to. Answer questions asked in the comments by your users. Such acts lead to a conversation to build up and more people can participate in it, and put their opinion there. For that you need the special comment mod that I have discussed in this post. It is called Brian’s Threaded Comment plugin which allows user to reply to a particular comment.

Controversial Topics

Controversial topics are another comment attractor type posts. I try to stay away from it for the most part, but they do get tons of comments, and alot of people get heated in the comments which is a downside because blogs are friendly places not a place to start a fight. One of my posts which I wrote about Host Gator scamming people with their marketing technique… actually resulted in 34 comments and even got big enough to have the admin of Host Gator visit the blog and reply. Topics of this sort tend to get alot of comments, but due to the fights and anger I try to stay away from those for the most part.

Offer Freebies

Freebies are one of the biggest user/commentator attractor to your website. Everyone love free stuff right. When they are happy with your free products, they will reply, and when they are not happy they will also reply. You are getting more comments either way plus more page views for your website.

Above are some of the things that I have noticed with Balkhis that attracted more commentators to my posts. You can use the same techniques and get more comments on your posts as well because I am sure people don’t like seeing a 0 comments next to their posts.

I remember seeing the earlier websites when I was very young. Most of those websites had repeatable tile background. Which in most cases looked pretty darn ugly. Well looks like now most designers are turning back to a retro look of the design and some are even coming back with their repetitive background designs and purely web 2.0. I know most of the design requests that I am getting now are people asking that their websites to be web 2.0, and Half of those people don’t even know what Web 2.0 is when they first ask me. Maybe it is just a hype right now that people wanting such designs.

Well in this post, I am asking my users what do they prefer? A more techy looking website, or a more simplistic retro style website? I will find about what my users prefers, but I know that most designers and their clients are liking retro style because css collection sites are now getting more and more entries of websites with such style. I think Gone are the days of the techy complicated designs.

I just spent a few minutes and there were too many examples to pick from. I picked these ones because they clearly demonstrate the use of retro/web 2.0 designs.

An extremely nice looking website featuring wooden repeatable background.

Active web directory is a true example of simplicity and beauty.

… [More is in the free post, and it also include some freebies. You should check it out]